[Main Blog Post] My Spiritual Path

[jprussell]

So, I'm with some of my kinfolk for the holiday weekend, and I didn't wrap up the editing I was hoping to do before getting here. As such, I want to post something on time, but I may make some edits in the next few days. At any rate, this is a walkthrough of the beliefs I've had over the years, and how they got me to where I am now. This might be super self-indulgent, but I'd like to hear what you think.

As I said, I might make some edits, but in the meantime, let me have it.

Comments

[thinking_turtle]

Thanks for sharing your personal story. I also remember Magic the Gathering and Tolkien from my youth. It seems that a certain international uniformity was already present back then!

Eric S. Raymond's blog "Dancing With The Gods" was an enjoyable read. He had a "sudden intense" religious awakening. He worships different or no Gods at different times. He has a limited list of ways to contact his subconscious. It's amazing how varied religious experience is! Raymond also writes "Scientific method cannot ultimately be reconciled with religious faith". For me science and religions are both views of the same underlying reality. If they contradict, at least one of them is wrong. I wonder why Eric writes they cannot be reconciled.

That JMG sees "scientific realism" as what you can sense with the five senses is surprising to me. Our zeitgeist is very disconnected from our five senses. For most people, the spectacle is more important than what their senses tell them. Twentieth century physics is no exception: there's not much about quantum, space walks or relativity that one can sense. I'm no expert in planes, but I believe you won't find any modern science on the material plane.

To share, since you write you're interested in Roman history, I've been reading "A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry" https://acoup.blog/. Apologies if I learned about that blog from your blog!

[jprussell]

Well, a uniform nerd culture, if nothing else! :)

It certainly is amazing how different different folks' religious experiences are. I'm reading William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience, and even though I'm not too far, it already has done a lot to show how much very different stuff all gets called "religious." As for why ESR thinks science and religion can't be reconciled, here's a few of his posts where he expands on that - reading at least his comments in the comment thread might also be helpful: What is Truth?, Predictability, Computability, and Free Will.

As for JMG and scientific materialism, my understanding of what he's saying, and which I am pretty sure I agree with, is that the view of most scientifically-minded folks is that the material plane is all there is. Quantum mechanics and relativity may not be directly observable by us, but their experimental and theoretical grounding is in observations of the material universe. Sure, there's been a whole lot of speculation from there (for example, one criticism of the currently-fashionable string theory is that much of the work does not ground out in observations that can be tested by experiment). I agree that most folks are rather disconnected from actually using and experiencing their five senses, lost in varying degrees of spectacle, as you say, but those specatacles are still for your eyes, your nerves, and your tastes.

And thank you for the link to ACOUP! I actually just found him a month or two ago, and I don't think I've mentioned him on the blog. I read his series on Sparta and found it fairly interesting, so I'll have to look more into his archives.

[thinking_turtle]

Thanks for the ESR links! He writes "truth is what makes the future less surprising". He must define truth as a model of reality. So there can be multiple truths with varying degrees of truthfulness. I thought truth was reality itself, infinitely more complex than the human mind can hold, and something that makes the future more surprising.

The other essay says "The religiously inclined can believe in that perfect observer and identify it with God". Not sure what to make of that. I'm sure Thor can't predict what Odin will do. That God is all-knowing means you can't have secrets from God, not that God knows everything and can predict the future.

A spectacle's material presence consists of ink, sound waves or pixels. These are what you can sense. Yet when you listen to radio news, you do not think about the voice, but about the mental image that the spectacle projects. Most people are occupied by these images most of the time.

That struck me as I was sewing a red bag, per the Magic Monday FAQ. It's so unusual to to create a thing. We mostly buy commodities!

[jprussell]

On ESR and Truth: yeah, I think he's using "truth" as shorthand for "what can we know and state confidently with a rigorous epistemology." A lot of his thinking was shaped by Korzybski's General Semantics, and since then he has said he has a lot in common with the Rationalist folks from LessWrong.

And as for the the all-knowing God, I think he was going for the most extreme version of omniscience in order to make the point of what an "outside perfect observer" could be, in service of making his wider point.

On spectacle: oh yeah, defintely. That's one thing I like about the occult philosophy JMG has introduced me to - it helps to make that distinction very clear and gives a good, solid way to think about it. It is perhaps one of the ironies of the modern world that so many folks spend so much time immersed in the non-material, but if you asked them what they believe about the world, they'd say that only the material world is real.

On making things: very much so! It really is shocking how meaningful it is to make something with your hands when you almost never do so. I'm always pleasantly surprised by how great it feels to do something crafty, even if I'm not very good at it.

[thinking_turtle]

Likewise, real-life crafting is not my strong point, yet it feels very meaningful.

Thanks for your reply, and looking forward to the next post!